Yesterday we learned about the Defense Department’s pre-war “planning,” if you could call it that, in August 2002, based on wildly optimistic expectations that are almost comical in hindsight. As the NYT noted, the newly declassified plans “provide a firsthand look at how far the violent reality of Iraq today has deviated from assumptions that once laid the basis for an exercise in pre-emptive war.”
By this point, Iraq is supposed to have been a burgeoning and stable democracy, spreading hope throughout the region, and without only 5,000 U.S. troops sticking around. Given the crisis in Iraq now, even the Bush White House, for all of its problems with reality, should be able to acknowledge the mistaken assumptions of 2002, right?
Wrong. From yesterday’s White House press briefing:
Q: Slides from a pre-war briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
MR. SNOW: I’m not sure anything went wrong. At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas. It is very difficult — no, Jessica, the fact is, a war is a big, complex thing. And what you’re talking about is a 2002 assessment. We’re now in the year 2007, and it is well-known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy. (emphasis added)
Look, this need not be complicated. In 2002, the administration, in consultation with military leaders, made a series of assumptions about what would happen after we launched our invasion. They made plans based on those assumptions. Every single one of those beliefs turned out to be wrong. And yet, there was the president’s chief spokesperson, telling the White House press corps, “I’m not sure anything went wrong.”
Maybe he meant to say, “I’m not sure anything went right,” but got confused?
For that matter, if it’s “well known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy,” then why, exactly, spend months and pull together volumes of intelligence to craft a war plan in the first place?
To hear Snow tell it, he’s not only a qualified expert on the history of combat, he also is convinced war plans are thrown out the window once the war actually starts. By this logic, when Gen. Tommy Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, they were just wasting their time. If only they had the good sense to contact someone who had “studied any war,” they wouldn’t have had to spend so much time drawing up a “moot” strategy.
Honestly, is Snow trying to appear foolish?